Are you a Trustee of a charity, or its Treasurer?

Our new Service offers you, free of charge, information that you may need to help you to understand your charity’s investments in the area of Common Investment Funds (CIFs).

Allenbridge has a long record of working actively with the charitable sector, both in the voluntary work of our employees, and in direct corporate giving.

But we wanted to see if we could also add value to the work of UK charities through our actual business, which is centred around detailed proprietary research into the performance of UK funds – mainly Unit Trusts, Investment Trusts and, increasingly, large pension funds. With 14,000 individual clients, some £25 billion of institutional funds under advisement, and an enviable record of performance over twenty-five years, we thought, perhaps immodestly, that we might have something to offer.

Charity trustees have duties of prudence and care, which extend to the investments under their control. These produce the income which enables the charity to function and carry out good work. The better the investments perform, consistent with security, the more income there is likely to be. Investing in high quality, well-managed funds and avoiding underperforming funds will, in the long term, be good for the charity and good for those it helps and supports.

You can now see online, in one place, details and performance (rankings) of the forty-five funds which are CIFs – collective investment schemes established by the Charities Commission, and which are themselves recognised by law as charities. These funds hold over £80.7 billion of charity assets (July 2008).

Our tables lay out clearly how funds have performed, both against each other and against appropriate “benchmarks”. While there can be no guarantee that past performance is a necessary guide to future performance, we hope that the research will help trustees to develop a more informed view on the make-up of their current portfolio, and the options they have to improve performance.